SAS Viya vs. Snowflake

We piloted SAS AA at my organization to see how well it compares with other free software tools such as RStudio and Anaconda. So far what we saw was very impressive especially with the visual display but was a little out of our price range. It would be useful in analyzing population health metrics combined with financial data.

Incentivized

If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options.

Incentivized

• SAS is can be used as query builder tool which can automate a lot of excel process.
• There are variety of statistical options available that tie up good visual analytics.
• There are inbuilt models available for different operations which doesn't require any coding and are easy to run.

Incentivized

• Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
• Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
• Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
• Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
• Snowflake offers online training for various employee types

Incentivized

• SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
• SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.

Incentivized

• Add constraints for views and not just for tables
• Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.

Incentivized

Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.

SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to

Incentivized

If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.

The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.

Incentivized

SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.

Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.

SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.

Incentivized

We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.

Incentivized

SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.

There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.

Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.

SAS is faster then both SPSS and STATA. SAS also has better models and graphs when comparing the three softwares. However, STATA and SPSS are more user friendly. It is easy to use SPSS and STATA, because a lot of it is point-click. SAS requires some training to be able to use it as effectively as possible. SAS is better with large data sets, and it is easier to analyze many data points at the same time

Incentivized

Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons.

Incentivized

It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.

• SAS is pretty expensive, so a company would need to take that into consideration before purchasing a license.
• A lot of companies are now starting to use SAS Advance Analytics, it is great for sharing data between departments.
• Presentations come out better when using SAS, and estimates are more precise to the confidence interval.

Incentivized

• With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
• Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
• Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.

Incentivized